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From: Larry Weiss <
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Date: December 21, 2013 at 5:20:25 PM EST

Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Woodstock

>Weiss’s carping ignorance is tedious. Had he actually read

>my Richard II, Part One, as he claims in his two equally

>ignorant discussions of my book, he would know that the

>text was first published by Halliwell in 1870 under the

>title A Tragedy of King Richard the Second, and by its

>second editor Wolfgang Keller as Richard II Part One.

How does that make it any more the “true title,” when the actual MS has no title? No commentator’s title has more authority than another’s. By the way, neither Halliwell nor Keller attributed the work to Shakespeare. As Egan himself reports in his treatise, J.O. Halliwell-Phillips left “all the questions open” (I Egan 5) while Keller was unequivocal that the “play cannot have been written as an introduction to Shakespeare’s” and he considered “bold speculations to be worthless” (id. at 21). Perhaps Egan would do well to re-read the books that bear his name, or at least accurately describe them.

>The title was forcibly changed in the 1920s by academics

>who wanted to distance the play from Shakespeare.

No doubt after a prolonged exchange of artillery fire and a contested amphibious landing resulting in the ultimate overpowering of the gallant defenders by numerically superior forces.

[Editor’s Note: I am going to step-in relatively early in this Egan-Weiss conflagration. Before this exchange gets anymore out of hand than it already has, I am announcing that I will allow one more exchange and then this thread is over. He said-He said, He said-She said, She-said-He-said, She-said-She-said altercations tend to amuse only the contestants. One more each and then that is that. –Hardy]